


in the dark, all cats are grey

by youremyqueen



Category: Death Note
Genre: Anal Sex, Dysfunctional Relationships, Halloween, M/M, Minor Violence, Post-Series, Sexual Content, Stalking, birthday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 06:30:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5364923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which L lives, ages poorly, has no friends, struggles for meaning in the modern era, and carries on a mutually unfulfilling but indispensable sexual relationship with his second least favorite serial killer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the dark, all cats are grey

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably the most id-stroking, personal wish fulfilling thing i've ever written and it's the closest i'll ever get to a happy ending. i originally started writing it on halloween and it is set, conditional of my increasing inability to write realistically about the early 2000's with any confidence or passion, in the current year of 2015, and follows the manga timeline as far as L's age goes.
> 
> it was supposed to have a lot more sex and violence but ended up comparatively gentle and conversation-laden. expect circular logic, apathy, bad jokes, plenty of references to light, walls of texts, my enduring obsession with diner scenes, and probably the most realistic (read: unsexy) sex scenes i have written to date.
> 
> B's explanation of the black cat analogy is off a little and is written the way i remembered it, not how it actually turned out to be when i looked it up.
> 
> thank you for reading. if you make it to the end of this mess, i salute you.

Six years and he’s still dead. Six years and L is thirty-six and Tokyo is exactly how he remembers it, only with the brightness turned up. Nothing ever sleeps and the Kira case is old news. They still have the memorials, there are still fansites, twitters praising his name, but the hype has died down. There have been brutal crimes in the last six years. There have been wars. New celebrities have worn embarrassing outfits and said embarrassing things and the culture turns and bends with each new happening, data, data, data, until there’s nothing else but led-blue, text, laughter from all around at some joke he can’t keep up with.

Ghosts don’t sleep, the streets burn with white light, and he smokes a cigarette on the hotel balcony even though he shouldn’t. His body is in ill-repair, wasn’t meant to last this long, and he doesn’t take his prescription bottles with him because they’re a nuisance, hard to keep track of, depressing to look at. He has antidepressants, too, but those are even worse. He doesn’t need serotonin to catch killers, he needs nicotine, caffeine, wi-fi, and good help.

There’s a loud knock on the door. Isn’t that how every good mystery starts? Raymond Chandler said: _When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand._

“Room service.” 

L is always in doubt, and he hadn’t ordered anything, and the plaster at the edge of the doorframe is cracked, cheap, up-charged on account of aesthetic—neat, Scandinavian modernism, sharp lines and the sort of white you can’t relax around—but shoddy craftsmanship, worth nothing underneath. This sort of thing will fall out of style, will erode. None of this is going anywhere.

He answers the door and the man that meets him doesn’t have a gun, doesn’t have a notebook, doesn’t have the right face or the exact shade of hair, the exact cut of suit, but it’s close enough to unnerve him. Metallic auburn, fresh from the bottle, and the cleanest, closest shave, color contacts, skin dye, even, maybe, maybe, if he’d go that far. Of course he’d go that far.

He hasn’t seen B since Amsterdam. He’d jumped into the Amstel to escape the police after setting the Rijksmuseum on fire and completely destroying a Rembrandt and at least two Vermeers. L had thought about jumping in after him, the way that cold water feels on cold skin, and then hot water, and then bed sheets, and he’d gone back to his hotel room and showered and gone to sleep, because grand gestures require too much energy, really, and when he’d woken his window had been unlatched and the space beside him on the king-sized bed warm.

He is nothing but audacity, pure mettle dressed in a white spine and dirty fingernails, but he’s cleaned up today, he’s almost golden, and he’s just here to show his impudence, to take it and hold it up and smear in L’s face in great filthy streaks. L presses his wince in between his lips and holds it there until it settles, turns it wry, turns it out, is nothing but impudent in return.

“Good one,” he says as if he’s reacting to a particularly uninspired joke, glancing B up and down and then turning away from the door to amble back into the room, but leaving it ajar so that the yellow hallway light spills into the blue dark of his suite and throws his maudlin mood all askew. B spills in with it. He’s wearing leather oxfords. He looks ridiculous.

“Happy birthday,” B tells him, in Japanese, and L turns fast, feels the quiet air of the late night whip and waver around him, gives him a smile, and lifts the bedside lamp off its table, tugging the plug carelessly from the wall, and throws it at him. It knocks his shoulder, knocks his smug blazer, and he wobbles back, and then laughs and laughs and laughs, hands quick, hands everywhere, launching himself across the room and pushing his fingers into L’s hair and grabbing him close and breathing against his forehead in frenzied little wheezes. “It’s your birthday, it’s your birthday, and I know what you wished for.”

L doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to be clever in this situation, so he shoves, grappling until he’s made space between them and then lurching suddenly to throw B against the wall and stumble back several paces. It’s strange that they don’t look the same. B has always looked like him, if only in blotches, with the focus off, same colors, same shapes, same patterns of movement, the sort of thing one can learn. His jaw is his jaw and his nose is his nose and always has been, and still is now, not Light’s, not as pristine, not rotted through in the ground somewhere not far from here. Somewhere not far from here the body is decaying and it used to sleep beside L, and it used to lie, to joke, to make up games for itself. That thing is gone now. L has only one thing left and it’s chased him around the world and asked him to chase it.

Asked and he’d said yes.

His loneliness is supposed to be a secret, but it’s not. 

He wipes at parts of his skin that B had been touching, almost self-consciously, and B breathes heavy and riled at him from where he’s slumped into the wall.

“Wash it off,” L orders him. “It’s temporary dye, isn’t it? Wash it all off. Take it all off. You’re sickening to look at.”

“You’re sickening to look at,” B parrots back at him, and then grins at his own joke. “Is that really something you’d say to him? Come on, don’t you want to play pretend like we used to? You be the hero, and I’ll be the villain, or maybe it’s the other way around, but who cares, really. All that matters is that you kill me, so the way it all comes out is that you’re the good guy. That’s how it works. Winner takes all.” He pushes himself off the wall. “So, take it. I bet you can break my arm again if you try. That was fun, wasn’t it, in Belize? I do enjoy our little trysts.”

L grabs him by the scruff of his white collared shirt. It’s starched so stiff it doesn’t collapse in his hand, but pushes back, resistance, oh, it’s just as futile as anything, oh, they’re both going to die, and they both deserve to die, and they both should have died by now if there were any, well, justice in the world. Isn’t that a lark? L’s fist clenches and he can feel B’s skin clammy against his wrist and it’s all terribly funny.

“Well, keep up, you’re lagging off your mark,” B grumbles. “Now you hit me, and I throw you on the bed, and you tell me to go to hell, and then I have my wicked way with you. It’s all very systematic but you have to do your part.”

L snorts. His hand loosens and then drops. “I want another cigarette. The shower’s all yours.”

B rolls his eyes. “You could at least hit me. I put so much work into this fucking costume.”

L shrugs. “I threw a lamp at you.”

“It was some kind of light-weight, energy-efficient piece of shit. Hardly enough to bruise. After Belize it took me a week to get the blood out from under my nails, and the welts, they—" 

L juts an eyebrow, steps back to feel around for his pack, and mumbles, “Is that all I am to you, a bit of sadomasochistic fun on the weekends?” with the sort of flat voiced amusement that he has shared with no one in the last three and a half months since they’d spoken. L can count on two hands the number of people he’s spoken to in person at all in that time. 

“Well, we could have sadomasochistic fun all the time if you’d just invest in my private airline fund. Having to nick credit cards and falsify passports always is what really slows down the travel time between one excursion and the next. Planning the crimes and the hints, that’s kid stuff, and, well, this,”—he gestures up and down along his body, the mask-like quality of his face—“this sort of thing just comes to me, like Archimedes in the bathtub.”

“Eureka,” L says, flatly, and considers, but ultimately decides against, phoning the police.

 

—

 

The room is too bare, it’s unbearable, it’s trite, and the little soaps in the little cardboard boxes aren’t enough to wash him clean. The whole wall above the sink is a mirror and they look like a circus act standing together, B dressed as Light and L dressed as himself, or as B dressed as himself, a bad impersonation, a nice try, but the real L is dead and you, sir, are an imposter.

His hands are dry and peeling on the back, knuckles rough. When they were children they’d waded in the river. Stones and stones and fish bones, and B had caught him around the shoulders and dragged him under once and A had laughed until the moment had broken, strummed by the tree branches, speckled with buds, the wind in spring, the smell of all the dirt, and the feel of it, all up their arms, between their toes, the river water in their lungs and gasping on the bank while Roger had yelled at them both in a blurry, washed voice. B had lain beside him and smiled at him as if they had both known the same thing, been thinking it all along, since they’d ever sat across the table at dinner and disliked each other, or liked each other, or loved each other, whatever had been the order of the day.

They’d been raised like brothers, sometimes, and other times like fight dogs. B admires himself in the mirror and L rolls his eyes.

“I pull it off.” His lips and his cheeks are stained the same color, a fake tan, bad blotchy paint job, and L looks himself in the eyes when he shakes his head, and says, “No, you don’t.” 

He turns on the water, hot in an instant, because convenience is what he’s paying for, one of the few comforts he has left, and it smells hot, feels gauzy, the tinkle of the droplets against the glass pane distinct and irking. It’s an awkward moment because he makes it one. They’ve seen each other naked so many times before, but he doesn’t look when B strips. 

“You killed a girl to get me here,” L says to the towel rack. 

“Actually, I killed two.” The glass door skitters all the way open, almost soundless, but not quite, and the water splatters against the tile differently, disturbed, there’s a body in a it, there’s a body and it’s B’s body but it’s wearing Light’s skin and it was a bad joke, a sick joke, but he starts to think that the punchline hasn’t hit him yet. “They just haven’t found the other body yet. I’m surprised you didn’t catch onto the unevenness. Everything is in twos this year.” 

“You burnt three paintings.”

“That was an accident. I didn’t know that security guard was going to be smoking, did I? He looked like a straight-lace. He ate a granola bar on his lunch and gave half to the pigeons.” 

L grins and doesn’t fight it. B is vicious, he doesn’t know when to stop, he doesn’t check the time, he’s jittery, he doesn’t repent, he hits well and he kneels better and he is always in the corner of the room, at the edge of L’s line of sight, he is always just about to say something, making a face, counting one from two from three until the moments like this, like the restaurant in Belize, like staring across the river at each other in Amsterdam, where they catch one another in the space between and waft and waver there.

The bathroom is starting to steam up. L walks to the far wall and cracks the window.

“You’re not as clever as you think,” he says. “I always know that it’s you. You engineer all these ploys, but you may as well just write me a letter and sign your name.”

“You wouldn’t come without the bodies. You’ve got a nose for blood and that’s why I keep a knife on me. Maybe if you were a painter I’d be a life model, but we got caught in the same trap and you couldn’t be anything but a detective, and a detective needs a crime.”

L sniffs. There’s laughter from outside the window, and music, mundanities, someone is having a party, people are happy, people are chatting to one another, and thinking about ways to look impressive, and drinking, and glancing at their phones, and none of them know that in the room two floors down and to the left the man who left the dismembered woman on the subway train is shampooing his hair. 

L says, “There’s enough crime already. You don’t have to drum it up.” 

B is humming along to the music outside. “You wouldn’t like me so much if I didn’t keep you running.”

“I don’t like you much as it is.”

The door slides open and water pours out, getting on the tile floor, getting on the towels. B is melting in neutral colors, hair a bleach blonde, mascara running out of his eyes and down his cheeks. He’s thin, he’s flaccid, he’s out of date, and his expression is without accusation, but it is—like everything, like the room, the white towels, the white tile, the party—a lie. 

“Get in.” His hand is cleaner than L’s ever seen it, fingernails filed down, cuticles oiled, pretension, pretension, and it hangs there not as an invitation but as an insistence.

“I already showered today.”

“Even if that were true, I wouldn’t care.” He grabs L by the front of his shirt and gives a jolly tug, and L, without any pretense of a struggle, falls in with it, and the door is slid closed behind him.

The heat is stifling, and B looks like himself but not like himself, because there is no _himself_ , there are only shades of this or that, copies, conspiracies, jokes, masks for days, and this blur is just the in-between, the dressing room, as one impression fades into another and B takes on someone else’s shadow. His, of course. And what does he do when L is not around? Something, for christ’s sake, he must, but it’s hard to imagine, hard to believe that he exists at all, and isn’t just called into form by his being perceived. A long time ago, in the river, in the classroom, in the library stacks with all the sounds of crickets, and the branches scraping the window, and tea and crisps, he had been something, a boy, they had been two boys, but now L is thirty-six years old and that boy has stayed where he is, in the old house, in the stacks, and the thing that follows L is his own, is his shadow and it bends when he bends and it flickers and disappears in the wrong lighting.

He’s looking at the wall, and the water hitting the wall, and B grips his chin and pulls his eyes up. He looks strange with his hair that color, unlike L and therefore foreign, a disruption, the unfamiliar, and as hum-drum as he denounces his life, as unlivably dull, the pattern sustains him. He solves cases. He rents out hotel suites. Crime happens, B follows him, dresses up like him, nobody visits him, nobody makes personal calls, except the shadow, but if B is not the shadow, if B has bleached blond hair, then he is not alone in the shower, he is with somebody else, and he can’t bear to look at them or be looked at.

He clenches his jaw but he doesn’t close his eyes. It’s all so uncomfortable and his clothes are soaked and weighing him down. Everything is blurry white patterns, and they are distorted here, by the water, and the heat, and B’s eyes which are not L’s eyes, and B’s mouth which is not L’s mouth, but he’s putting his mouth on B’s mouth because it is strange, because the skin there is usually bitten raw but it’s clean now, he’s clean, they’re so clean it’s sickening and he feels warm when he touches him but it only lasts for a half a second before he’s shoved off, away.

B frowns, grunts uncomfortably, and runs a hand through his hair. L is more shocked than insulted.

“I’m sorry, did I miss a meeting?” he snaps, almost laughing with the ferocity of his discomfort—this is not how it goes, not at all, he fights B and B grabs him and grabs him and begs him and eventually he gives in, but they beat each other bloody first, and L does not make the first move and he is certainly _not_ refused, he is never refused, he always gets what he says he doesn’t want. “Is this not what you came here looking for? ‘Bit of sadomasochistic fun?’ Have you gone very chaste in the last five minutes? Should we just hold hands and build up to the,”—

B, of course, gives his a shove to the chest, and that’s more on track, and he takes his entire body and lays it over L’s like a shield and he is shaking his head so fast, fingers jittery, gasping, “You’re not getting it, you’re not getting it, it’s all leading somewhere, don’t you understand? Now the rising music, now the light show, now the death scene. It’s like one of those drawn out German films, swamped in allegory that we pretend to fully grasp, and lasting years instead of hours. We’ll have five lines together, and then a view of the street lamp, and then we’ll see each other in passing at Christmas, and then maybe one of us will fall ill and one of us will sit at the bedside thinking meaningful thoughts about how we should have just grasped it then, in the shower in Tokyo on Halloween.”

L is soaked, and his skin is too warm, and as B speaks water is falling into his mouth, garbling his words, and he’s so close that all L can see is blurry fluorescent blonde, and the splatter of the water against the tile in sharp focus behind it.

“But here we are in the shower in Tokyo on Halloween,” he murmurs, embarrassed for the both of them at his having to say things like this, “and I’m grasping it, so what are you doing?”

B breathes in his ear and it chafes a little bit, makes him warm in ways he’s looking to be: “Inhabiting the moment. Savoring it, in layman’s terms. I don’t know when we’ll have a chance like this again.”

His hand on L’s hip, rising up under his wet shirt—pornography tropes, gaudy, excessive, deteriorating, this will all end in shame and tiredness—his skin different than it’s ever been, or else it just feels different because L is receiving it with new sensors, conceiving it in an entirely different way. Everything of B is always a blur, and has been since he’d left Wammy’s, the boy in the rear-view shifting into the outline of a man, ghost with a can of gasoline, ghost with some big plans. Ghost making L uneasy with how easy he’s making it. 

“Have you seen a guard on my door lately?” he spits, feeling viperous, feeling cornered. Of course, it’s what he’d wanted, to be the pursued and not the pursuer, to lie back and have it done to him and not to lift a hand, not to do it, not to show that it’s a thing he wants done, but the first touch, as always, is hard to accept. Something quakes and asks to be put back, put it away, it lives behind closed doors and it doesn’t speak in words, it dictates to the machines and the machines buzz back, ecstatic. He shakes his head against the kiss that B doesn’t give him. “I don’t have a new Watari. You’ve got nothing but chances. Not my fault you always dine and dash.”

B grins. He likes the turn of phrase, L knows.

“Usually in the mornings I’m a little too thrashed for another go ‘round.”

“And I’m sure shoving cotton balls in your nose and downing half a bottle of stolen Vicodin works better than, say, my on-retainer medical staff?”

The last time he’d needed it. He was so bloodied he’d left stains on the hotel curtains, he’d thrown up in the sink, sucked water from the tap, and then disappeared, in classic movie-monster fashion, through the kitchenette window. L had checked all the local hospital registries for any man matching his description, but of course he wouldn’t have gone there. When he was eight he’d told L that he didn’t believe in doctors, and unlike most children who inevitably devolve into adults, B has never developed past that state of mind. He is his own nursemaid, his own professor, his own judge, jury and executioner. L is just the weapon. B holds him in his shaky hands and uses him by turns. 

“What are you saying?” he asks, voice feathery, mocking. L’s eyelids hurt to hear it. “Stick around next time, you’ll fix me up? Have your people bring me tea and cakes? Be gentle with me, finally, finally. Don’t be twisted. You’re never gonna love me. No one’s ever gonna love anybody, we’re just reaching for the same thing and touching hands, we’re in a dark room, we don’t even know what we’re reaching for, and we’re never gonna get to it it, but I can feel your skin on my skin like I felt it in that first moment, and if I think of you sitting on the Persian rug with your notes in your lap, your shitty handwriting, and the storm outside, the tree that fell in the yard and ripped up its roots from the ground, then sometimes I can be at peace with my existence.”

Then he asks, “Can you?” and L thinks he’s a pretentious little shit, and L thinks he’s going to push him up and through the shower door so that the glass flies everywhere, tiny flecks of it cutting up their skin, and that, if they exist, will be a perfect moment: that space in time where all the glass is in the air and B’s eyes go wide and he is surprised, he finds the state of things in one instant is utterly different to how it had been in the last instant, and he will pull L with him and he will hold him down in the wreckage, hold his hips, so the glass presses in between their skin, and bathroom light will flicker off and there will be silence and flesh. 

He could be at peace, but he can never take the chance that it will all fall through, that there is no such thing as salvation, and so instead he waits like he has been waiting for years. He says, “Will you drop the nonsense and fuck me already so that I can go to sleep and be rid of you?”

B, however, does not drop the nonsense at all.

 

—

 

Sometime during their grappling spill out of the bathroom, L’s weighted clothes dripping off his body—snake shedding its skin, snake shedding its snake and then what’s left? The worm, of course, naked and pale and hateful—he becomes detached from the scene. By the time they’re on the bed, wrinkling the crisp white package, he is floating up somewhere by the ceiling fan, looking at the cheap wood-imitation fixtures, thinking about fissures that will grow here, when the building gets old, and how like all fads it will die lonely, get torn down, replaced by a bigger building with a more cohesive schematic and a sauna. He wonders vaguely if the building he’d built to house Light is still there. He hadn’t bothered to check.

His face is flushed, his dick is hard, his body is moving unsteadily, all the right tricks but he can’t quite sell it. B is inside of him, it’s slippery, it’s loose enough to not be uncomfortable, but he feels only the repetition, flesh hitting flesh, and it’s not his own, he can’t feel it, there’s a burn inside of him but it’s not there, it’s in his head, it’s in his temples, he’s looking at cracks in the ceiling that aren’t there yet and he wonders if B goes to restaurants by himself, if he sits alone at diners and orders eggs and toast, drinks juice, winks at the waitress, leaves a tip. He thinks of himself on the other side of that booth, of saying something clever, and B grinning that grin.

He’s wincing now. He’ll start to wheeze soon, he’ll thrash, he’ll go stiff and he’ll come and L can’t seem to find the thrill in that, he only waits for it to be over. He hears the bedsprings creaking, anticipates the rhythm, sweats, thinks of the room service menu, thinks of the font they’d used—helvetica, size 11—and how soon to book his flight out of town.

B stops. “Are you even enjoying this?” he snaps. 

“Keep going,” L says. He can hear the faucet leaking from the bathroom, not turned all the way off.

B tries to pull out and L hooks his heels around his thighs, holding him in. His skin is clammy and he is frowning. The feel of B’s cock inside of him isn’t overly gratifying, and neither is the thought of it, which usually unnerves him enough to get him off, but there is something disgusting about the idea of letting him out, rolling over and calling it a night. L doesn’t feel aroused so much as taut, skin stretched too tight, sexual organs agitated. He won’t be satisfied by anything.

B shoves at his knees so he kicks him in the back of the thigh, fingers digging into his arm, he’s all coiled, and when B grabs him by the chin and asks him, “Why do you do this to yourself?” it’s like he’s putting his fingers over prints that are already there.

“Psychologically speaking, the urge toward sexual violence usually stems from unresolved,”—

“Not that.” B trembles with force, shakes him a little, would grab him by his lapels if he weren’t naked. “If I didn’t know why you did that I couldn’t do it to you, I would have to sit in that chair in the corner of the room and watch and come up with theories. I would turn on that lamp you threw at me and I would watch the shadows behind you until they started to look like places I had been to as a child, or people I had been afraid to speak to. That’s how I learn anything. It’s all in the senses. I’ve forgotten all the facts they taught us in class except by how they tasted when I spoke them.” He kisses L’s forehead, his temple, his cheek, the hollow beneath his eye, lips chaste and dry. “I know why you do this. I can taste it. What I don’t understand is why you do anything else.”

L’s rabidity is fast fading into an eerie calm. B doesn’t explain himself but he knows what he means, anyway: the empty rooms, the months, the telephone calls, data sheets, first class cabins, pills he doesn’t take, fan letters he doesn’t read. His shrug is awkward under B’s weight. “I’m old and I’m brittle and this has always been my way.”

B kisses his lips, but not hard. “You’re thirty-five. You’ve always been brittle. Get over yourself.”

“You have to get over me first.”

But he hasn’t yet, and he won’t.

 

—

 

Neither of them get off, and they’re tense and quiet when they go to breakfast. L has attached to the booth fantasy, and it has spawned appendages, little sugar packets flicking in his fingers, B putting too much pepper on his eggs, and sneezing, and grinning, and L has nothing in the world but the two dead bodies he is supposed to be investigating, and this fantasy. 

The case is solved; he chooses the route which promises him pancakes.

Western diners aren’t hard to find in Tokyo, and they’re cleaner than the real thing, and the waitresses smile, done up in fifties uniforms with aprons and tiny caps that border on fetishistic. B preens at them and they laugh at his mangled Japanese. He’s out of practice, and he looks foul and underfed in his blond hair and one of L’s shirts.

“Why don’t I buy you an apartment?” L asks him. “Why don’t I set you up in a little Venetian waterfront place with a grocery budget and a Netflix subscription and fly in when the silence gets to be too heavy on me and I need to work out my issues with self-isolation on something pliable and consenting?” He waits and watches B try to grin but not quite stretch his mouth around it. “Well? It’s not a rhetorical question and it’s not an offer. I’m really asking why I don’t.”

B shrugs and pops open one of the little half-and-half containers and pours it straight in his mouth. “That would make things too easy to be any fun. And, you know, I have my own Netflix account, right? It’s $8.99 a month. I’m no multi-billionaire, but I can swing that.”

“They raised it to $9.99 earlier this month.”

“It’ll stay the same for a year if you’re already subscribed.” Then he starts laughing, slim and hiccupy, pure gripeless amusement, and he has never rehearsed this moment, this moment is new and unaccounted for.

He looks at L with such fondness that it makes the bones in his fingers feel hollow, and this emotion is called euphoria.

“Nobody’s ever gonna love anybody,” L parrots back at him, to make a mockery and perhaps a point of this moment, so recent, fresh, barely observed. “We’re both just in a dark room. Care to defend your pretentious drivel against what you’re feeling for me now?”

B twills his fingers around one another, as if playing with an invisible finger trap. Their food comes and he waits, as people do, privately embarrassed by their personal conversations, for their server to leave. 

“It’s sort of like that saying, you know. I think it was Vincent Barry who said it originally, but I know it through Wendy Doniger’s work on comparative mythology. Something like: science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room; and philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room when there might not even be a cat in the room; and religion is like looking for a black cat in a dark room when there might not even be a cat in the room, but you keep insisting that there is, and you’ve just had your hands on it. I have my own addendum, which relates to love. Being in love is being a black cat in a dark room and chasing another. This inexpressible truth which all human thought and experiment is geared towards understanding is innately entwined with the question of love, and by being in love you embody the answer to this question, while still remaining unable to see it in full.” 

L is familiar with Doniger’s writing, and had even attended a lecture or two of hers at the University of Chicago in the early 2000’s, but he doesn’t recall the analogy in question, and doesn’t think a scholar as serious as her would think much of B’s romanticized affectation.

“And,” he asks, “does it affect the understanding at all whether or not the love is requited?” 

B shakes his head and stabs at his omelette. He eats as if he had gathered all of the ingredients and cooked the meal himself. “Love is not a tree in a forest. It’s not made real by being observed, and it’s not devalued by rejection. When it is felt, it forms, it becomes whole and separate from the person who begins it, and floats nebulous beside them, sometimes inside them, but not dependent upon their continued acceptance of it. Love doesn’t end, it simply leaves its original host and goes somewhere else, to float in some ether, even after the person who created it dies. Love is not chemicals in the brain, it’s not lust, it’s not higher thought and understanding, trust, hard work, or any of that shit. It’s an element, like fire or earth. It’s a creature. It has its own eyes and wants and calms and miseries. People treat it like they own it and it destroys them, but if you let it own you, if you let it lead you, you transcend your body, your dick, your lips, and your desire to possess, conquer, violate, or buy flowers. You just exist, and it’s love.”

L snorts juvenilely at the word _dick_. “You’re telling me you’re past desire? Please. You’re utterly full of shit. You talk well, your diction is improved, but you’re still just the same obnoxious teenager quoting Byron at me in the study to make yourself sound deep. Your grand theory on love is a justification, a way to convince yourself that it’s a valuable use of your life and intellect to spend years stalking me, fucking me every once in a while, and then going home to write unpublishable verses about it.” 

B squeezes one of the little half-and-half packets so hard that it pops open and spurts all over the window. Across the room, the waitresses gasp and laugh.

“This is why you don’t buy me an apartment. Because you can’t justify sentiment in yourself, and can’t stand anyone who is comfortable with it, and so you degrade anything that isn’t pristine and grey and horribly dull until you’re left to your pristine and grey and horribly dull life. You fight me off because you know I will always crawl back on hands and knees, I live on hands and knees, and you’re terrified of me because I’m not afraid of being down here, I’m not afraid of what my open wounds will say, I’m not afraid of taking pleasure in your presence, I’m not afraid of being locked to you from age six and onward, and I’m not at all afraid of _you_.”

The other patrons are looking over at them. It’s not 6 AM yet and the place is mostly empty, which leaves even more silence for B’s monologuing to reverberate off of. L pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Please, honey, not in front of the neighbors.” 

B stands, napkin falling off of his lap. “You’ll get the check, hmm?” 

“Yes,” L says, because money is a power he has, the only power, perhaps, “I’ll get the check.” 

B walks outside and L pays mutely with his phone and follows, because pride is a shallow thing, like all of his things, accounts, computers, oh, computers upon computers. He is exhausted by the progression of technology. He wants regression. He wants to slide back down into the primordial and see what is left of it all.

 

—

 

They take the train. L has an on-retainer driver and a limousine, but he doesn’t call her. He’d left his phone at the hotel, and he doesn’t want to go back there yet, if at all.

“Take me somewhere not nice,” he tells B.

“If that’s your qualification, then, boy oh boy, are you gonna love my motel room.”

The press of bodies in the morning rush of the Tokyo trains is blurry, hectic, and grounding. He feels silly for listening to B’s schmaltzy tirades, for feeling it like a new bone, grown suddenly, or else discovered at last, a genetic abnormality, always there, but skipped over in medical examinations. An extra vertebrae. A spare joint.

Everyone is on their phone.

They sit side-by-side in the section for the disabled, pregnant, and elderly, and L is prepared to stand if need be, and hopes that B will, too, in order to avoid further public discomfort. B leans his head on his shoulder. L can smell the hotel shampoo. He is used to the bleached hair by now.

He says, “Why did you dress up as him? For sex? Was it a roleplay? Were you trying to unnerve me or turn me on?”

“I thought those things worked interchangeably for you.” B shrugs. “I’ve hacked your files. I’ve read your Kira case notes.”

“I know you have.”

“So, I know what you felt. Don’t fight me on this one, don’t deny it. You loved him, for a space in time, however slim, and it separated off from you and it lives out there in the void somewhere and you can still touch it if you make any effort.”

L stares at him, doesn’t deny it, but he’s not looking to make a thing out of it. It’s been six years. The train halts, the automated woman’s voice speaking first in Japanese, then in English. “Are you jealous?”

“I might have been, but he’s dead and I’m not, so I think I won that round.”

L doesn’t think that’s really how it works, but he doesn’t say so. B’s ideas about love are poorly conceived, but compelling. He has bags of make-up in his motel bathroom, L assumes. He fills in his eyebrows and contours his cheeks. It’s all washed away now, but L can see specks of black at the corners of his eyes where it had fallen and been caught during the shower. He’d wipe them away if he had more tenderness, and if there weren’t all these other people here.

 

—

 

The room burns with low watt bulbs that make it hard for L to tell the bedsheets from B’s skin from the peeling plaster of the wall behind them. It all morphs together in some artistic impression of the moment which supersedes the moment itself. He slaps B just so he will slap him back, and when he does he holds on, gripping L’s jaw, and L holds himself up on his thighs so that B has to buck to stay inside of him.

“It doesn’t hurt enough,” L grits at him, because, “Harder!” would be trite.

“We’re staring meaningfully into each other’s eyes. It’s not supposed to hurt, you sleaze.” B’s fingers exert further pressure, though.

L snaps his hips. “I can’t even see your eyes in this light. This place smells terrible. What are you paying? I’m going to buy you a better room somewhere.” 

B tugs on his hair from the back so that L’s head is jerked backwards and his neck is arched up toward the ceiling, which is cracked, today, in real time, and bleeding off-color with water damage. “I thought you wanted to go somewhere not nice.”

“I take it back. My romanticization of the seedy was ill-founded and naive. I want to go back to where the water comes out the right temperature and they leave you little mints on your pillows. I’ll take all the hollowness of decadence, I really will. Decadence, at least, has no odor.” 

B palms his cock a couple of times, still too gentle. “Buy me that flat in Venice. Or, better yet, Berlin.”

“Are you extorting me?”

B’s breathing is shallow, and if he can ever be anything close to happy, he is now. His sentimentalism is like a live and glistening thing and it drips out of him and all down L’s thighs, makes him warm in a way he doesn’t know how to justify or accept. Love is the word that chases him. B kills people and calls it love. He’s never going to get him a flat, they’re never going to have a joint Netflix account, or a pet cat. L will never love him, not actively, not day by day, but it will swell in him at odd times, like now, with B beneath him, with the electrical hum of the building, and the strain in his calves from lifting himself continuously up and down.

“Yes,” B says, “but only as a sexual simulation. There are no bad tidings in this moment. It will all get dreary and existential and cold by the afternoon, I’m sure, but this morning is easy, and I don’t want to bleed. Only for right now, I don’t want to bleed.”

“This isn’t helping me work out my aggression at all,” L grunts, but he feels content, the long-nighted exultation of sleeplessness making everything blurry and, for once, forgiving. The room is not empty, he is not speaking only to the screen. He touches B on the chest, scrapes at his nipple, and B laugh shortly, makes a noise of further elation, he reacts, he is there. L is not alone in here. 

There is no solution. No one is writing a script for this film, it’s just one implausible scene after the next, and they’re not leading anywhere, they’re just dangling on the precipice. He could waste away with B, he thinks. He could absolutely give up on the world, on the work of his vapid life, leave it to M, to N, to another Kira, whomever. Let them have it. He could run away to Berlin, he thinks, or Cape Town, or Tokyo.

“I’ll fight you in the evening. It’ll be a full moon and we’ll get rowdy. I’ll bring gasoline and you can bathe me in it.” His hips jerk, his face screws up and he looks uncomfortable and L knows he’s enjoying this too much for him to rightly permit it, and yet. “I don’t know. I’ll say anything, just keep doing that. There’s time. The end isn’t here yet. You’re only thirty-five.”

He pulls L down by his hips and comes in him, sloppy, wincing, without the hassle of shame. It’s definitely the least physically satisfying sex they’ve had in years, but there’s something of kindness in it, and of gratitude. L’s not sure he needed another bloody nose, even if he’d get harder for one.

B pulls him off and lays him to the side, jerks him off with lazy attention. Sex, he knows, is just a temporary balm for an enduring wound, but he’s not sure what the antidote is, or if there is one. It probably isn’t domestic bliss with a serial murderer. That hadn’t worked the first time he’d tried it in, and it won’t now. But the moment is spectral and it asks nothing of him. He comes slowly and twitchily, thinking of a grocery list at the same time, how he’s supposed to call the prime minister of Nepal, how he’d never really liked white t-shirts and jeans, anyway.

“Happy birthday,” B tells him.

 

—

**fin.**


End file.
